Too Smart For Marriage

by Cathie Linz

  “You want a glass for that?” he asked, eyeing her with equal parts of awe and trepidation. He’d never seen his grandmother drink a beer before.

  “No, this will be fine. I know you were just concerned about me, and that’s why you acted the way you did tonight. And while I appreciate your concern, you really don’t have to worry, dear.” Claire patted his hand again. “I’d never dream of getting married again.”

  Reassured, he took a sip of beer.

  “Once you’re on social security, it makes much more sense just to live together,” she blithely stated. “Otherwise you lose benefits.”

  David choked so badly that Claire had to pound him on the back. “Oh dear. I’ve shocked you.”

  “Hell, yes!” he growled.

  “Well, dear, you’ll just have to live with it,” she said without an ounce of remorse before adding, “Don’t you worry about me. Focus your attention on Anastasia instead. That’s where your future lies.”

  His downfall, too, most likely, David thought darkly.

  7

  “IT’S GOT TO BE HERE someplace,” David muttered as he spread out his copy of the building’s blueprints on the worktable he’d set up in the finished basement. The lighting wasn’t great, but it was enough to allow him to see the marks he’d made where he’d already checked the structural integrity of the walls. He’d saved the most difficult for last. The east wall was partially blocked by the heating and cooling units and a new hot-water heater.

  If there was a hidden room down here, Chesty had camouflaged it well. But then, apparently, the speakeasy that had been located here had been equally discreet; it had never been raided once. During the past week, David had done some digging in the books he owned about the Prohibition era in Chicago and he’d found a few references to Chester “Chesty” Ferguson, but they’d only consisted of a sentence or two, always being overshadowed by the much more famous figure of the time, Al Capone.

  David was leaning forward to check the measurements from the blueprints versus the actual dimensions of the east wall, when what sounded like a rioting mob stampeded into the ice-cream parlor above him. It was Sunday. No workmen were scheduled to show up.

  Wondering what was going on, David hurried upstairs to check things out. He was greeted with chaos. And in the center of it was Anastasia, issuing orders to her troops.

  “Okay, Ryan and Jason will be painting the ceiling in here. Courtney and Heather, check out those wallpaper rolls against the wall. We’ve got to make the final choice between those two patterns and start putting up the paper on the far wall. Mom and Dad, you come into the kitchen with me to help Claire.”

  While she was speaking, she was also backing up—until she bumped right into David. “Sorry.” Her startled golden eyes gazed at him over her shoulder. Her hair was haphazardly piled on top of her head today. Her T-shirt had kids’ handprints on it and her denim shorts had a few jagged tears in some interesting places. “I didn’t know you were going to be here today,” she said. “I thought you said you were taking the day off.”

  David couldn’t help the inkling of suspicion that crept into his mind. What was she up to? She looked so guilty. Or was it just plain dismayed? She’d been deliberately avoiding him for the past week and he’d missed her. A lot. “What’s going on here?” he asked.

  “Nothing for you to be worried about. Go back downstairs and do whatever it was you were doing.” Putting her hands on his shoulders, she turned him toward the basement door. “Forget all about us.”

  “Not possible,” he assured her wryly.

  Anastasia wondered what he meant by that, if not being able to forget her was a good thing in his book, when she was distracted by her mom.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce us?” With her saltand-pepper hair and dainty appearance, Shirley Knight might look like an angelic sweetie, but she had the mind of a steel trap and no man in Anastasia’s life had been able to avoid getting caught in her steely snare.

  “Sure, Mom, this is David Sullivan, Claire’s grandson, but he can’t talk now because he’s in the middle of an important project downstairs,” she said all in one breath.

  Never one to beat around the bush, Shirley immediately asked, “Is he married?”

  “Mom!”

  David liked seeing Anastasia embarrassed. She could tell by the way he was grinning at her, the traitor. She could feel her face turning red. Why, she was actually blushing. She hated this. She was an adult. She could handle this. Heaven knows she should be used to her mom by now. The thing was, she wasn’t used to David and the way he made her feel.

  “I’m not married, Mrs. Knight,” David replied.

  Shirley positively beamed. “How nice.”

  Anastasia was relieved when her dad joined them, even if it was only to offer some mocking advice. “Run now, son, while you’ve still got the chance. I’m Anastasia’s father, by the way. The name is Bob Knight.”

  The sound of a Dean Martin song suddenly filled the air with “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.”

  “Dad, I told you to leave your records at home,” Jason said.

  “I did,” Bob replied. “This is a cassette.” He proudly pointed to the boom box in one corner. “The record player is too big to bring on the road. Hey, don’t touch that volume control!” He took off to vigorously discuss the matter with his sons, neither of whom shared his love for Dean.

  “Now, dear,” Shirley admonished her husband, “don’t get all riled up. You know how you get.” Thankfully she took off after him.

  “I probably should have warned you that my family was coming over to help Claire today, but I didn’t think you were ready to meet them yet,” Anastasia said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The fact that no sane person is ever ready to meet my family,” she noted with rueful affection. “Put all together, we can be something of a handful.”

  “You don’t think I can handle things?”

  Was it her imagination or had he chosen his words deliberately? There was a wicked light in his eyes that threw her a bit. Was David flirting with her? In front of her family?

  When he’d first shown up, her heart had almost stopped. Only because she knew what her mother’s reaction would be. It was the same whenever Shirley saw her only daughter with a man under sixty. She hadn’t always been that way. Before Jason and Ryan had gotten married, she’d been fairly stable.

  Oh, sure, she’d had that one lapse when she’d gotten fed up with Dad and sent him to live with Jason for a few days. But since then, her parents had been more lovey-dovey than ever. The problem was that since Jason’s wedding last month, her mom had started getting antsy about Anastasia settling down.

  Her brothers, sensing that something was up, were bound to add their own teasing to the mix. Which is why she’d wanted David as far away as possible from her family’s antics.

  But, perverse as David was, she should have known that just meant he’d want to stay that much more.

  “Fine,” she said. “Stay if you want to. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  As if to prove her point about her brothers, Jason joined them. “If you put my sister in a snit, you’re immediately a friend of mine. I’m Jason Knight.”

  “The bossy brother,” Anastasia added.

  “And I’m his wife. Heather Grayson-Knight,” said a woman who had come up to stand next to Jason.

  “The famous radio host of ‘Love on the Rocks,’” Anastasia added.

  “I don’t listen to much radio,” David said apologetically.

  “David is a graduate of the University of Fun Deprivation,” Anastasia explained. “Unlike my other brother, Ryan, who has a great sense of humor. Just one word of warning, don’t drink chocolate milk around him.”

  “Don’t ask,” Jason said at David’s frown of confusion.

  “Hey, I heard that,” Ryan said as he joined them. “That chocolate wallpaper incident happened yea
rs ago.”

  “Some things one never forgets,” Anastasia said solemnly.

  “Or some people.” Ryan added with a fond look at the woman who joined them to put her arm around his waist.

  “Ryan is referring to his wife, whom he was stupid enough to let go the first time they were together,” Anastasia explained. “But now an older and much wiser Ryan has realized his mistake.”

  “Ryan never admits to making a mistake. Hi, I’m Courtney. Ryan’s better half.”

  “You’ve got that right,” Ryan agreed.

  “Anastasia, I think this is such a neat idea, to open an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor,” Heather said. “I plan on mentioning it on the air.”

  “You see why the two of them get along so well,” Jason said.

  David nodded in sympathy.

  “I think it’s a brilliant idea,” Courtney agreed.

  “Make that the three of them,” Jason said.

  Looking at the three women, David could see that physically they were very different. Tall and slender, Courtney had long pale blond hair, while Heather was shorter and had shoulder-length auburn hair. In his view, Anastasia was the one who stood out. She was like a force of nature, with her golden eyes and long brown hair, which even now was tumbling down, making him long to reach out and run his fingers through it.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t invite you guys over here to shoot the breeze,” she was telling her brothers.

  “You didn’t invite us at all,” Ryan said. “You demanded our presence.”

  “You’re my brothers. It’s my job to browbeat you.”

  “I thought that’s what we had wives for,” Ryan retorted. “Ouch!” This as Courtney socked him. “What did I say?”

  “He gives you any trouble, just come to me,” Anastasia said. “I know where all his dorky-looking baby pictures are.”

  “You’re in most of them,” Ryan remarked.

  “I was a beautiful baby. You were the only one always grinning like an idiot.”

  “And you were the one who punched the minister in the nose during our christening,” Ryan said. “You should get our mom to tell you that story, David. She does it so well.”

  “Forget it.” Anastasia grabbed one of the tele-scoping rollers for ceiling painting and shoved it at Ryan. “Here, time is flying. You’d better get started.”

  “Why are you putting your family to work?” David asked.

  “They wanted to help, despite what Ryan said. I figured we could use the extra hands. I mean, the opening is only two weeks away and there’s still a lot to be done. And you’ve been working so hard that I thought you could use some help.”

  The truth was, David had gotten a tremendous sense of accomplishment from the renovation work he’d been doing. Since starting it, he found himself actually looking forward to getting up in the morning. He’d forgotten how much he enjoyed working with his hands.

  “Are you upset that I asked them to help?” Anastasia said.

  “No, not at all. You’re right, I could use the help, so thanks.”

  “Soitenly,” she quipped with one of her trademark grins before groaning as the sound of Dean Martin’s “Welcome to My World” filled the room, and half the surrounding block. “Dad, you’ve got that turned up too loud.”

  “Maybe you should have my grandmother put on her Bruce Springsteen tape,” David suggested.

  “Oh, so you noticed that, did you?”

  “It was hard not to when her musical tastes used to be limited to Lawrence Welk,” he noted dryly.

  Anastasia shrugged. “All I did was play the tape in my car and she liked it.”

  “So she told me. She also told me to mind my own business where she and Ira are concerned.”

  “I told you that, too,” Anastasia reminded him.

  “Yeah, but I listened to her.”

  She smiled. “Well, that’s a point in your favor.”

  “So you’re not mad at me anymore?”

  She eyed him with caution. “This isn’t another attempt to get me back in your corner so that you can gang up on Claire?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” he solemnly vowed.

  She remembered how he’d looked at her so apologetically, oozing sex appeal and remorse, once before. But this time there was an earnestness that she decided to trust. “Okay, but you screw up this time and you’re in deep doo-doo.”

  He grinned. “For a librarian, you have such a way with words.”

  “Must be the Three Stooges’ influence on me.”

  “Anastasia, I’m going to grab your parents for their input in the kitchen,” Claire called out.

  “Go right ahead.” To David, Anastasia added, “My mom is going to help Claire whip up a few batches of ice cream while my dad samples them. Your grandmother is still experimenting with special flavors.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said in amusement. “Avoid the peach-peppermint pecan.”

  “In the olden days they actually had flavors like asparagus or oyster soup ice cream. Delmonico’s in New York had pumpernickel rye bread ice cream on their menu. Compared to that, the peach-peppermint pecan isn’t so bad.” She knew something else that wasn’t so bad, and that was David’s smile. That dimple of his flashed and she was a goner.

  “I would think that naming the place would be more important than thinking up new flavors of ice cream.”

  “I heard that,” Claire said as she came through the kitchen’s swing door with a spoonful of ice cream in hand. “Here, taste this.”

  David eyed it cautiously. “What is it?”

  “Ice cream.”

  “What flavoooo—” The ending of the word was cut off by his grandmother sticking the spoon in his mouth.

  “It was melting,” she explained. “Bob thought it was good, right, Bob?” she turned to ask over her shoulder.

  “You bet. I think I’m going to have to loosen my belt a notch or two before I get out of here,” Bob said.

  Her dad had gained some weight since retiring from the Chicago Transit Authority and his thick hair was now entirely white, but to Anastasia he’d always be the man who righted the world’s wrongs when she was little, the one who’d helped give her the confidence to go out and fight her own battles.

  “The ice cream is…interesting,” David said. “What is it?”

  “Cranberry.”

  David grimaced. “Not my favorite.”

  “I didn’t catch the name of your ice-cream parlor,” Bob said to Claire.

  “That’s because she hasn’t settled on one yet,” David said.

  “How about Cone Home?” Ryan paused in his painting to suggest from the far corner.

  “Or The Inside Scoop,” Heather suggested from the table where she and Courtney had spread out the wallpaper rolls.

  The next suggestion came from Jason, of all people. “Or The Big Dipper.”

  Claire waved her arms in excitement. “That’s it! That’s the name. I knew I’d know the right one as soon as I heard it.”

  “And not a moment too soon,” David noted. “The grand opening is only two weeks away.”

  “I’ll call the sign maker right away and tell him to go ahead with that design I chose. The Big Dipper,” Claire repeated. “Yes, it feels right.”

  BY THE TIME her family left, it was nearly dark. “I can’t thank you enough for having everyone come over and help out the way they did,” Claire said.

  “That’s what friends and their family are for.”

  “Friends don’t come better than you.” Claire gave her a big hug. “The Big Dipper has its name and its wallpaper thanks to the Knight family. I know that most of the walls are painted blue, but that one far wall really needed something to make it stand out and I think we’ve got it.”

  The wallpaper pattern was cheerful and old-fashioned at the same time, and had been the unanimous nomination of both Heather and Courtney.

  “Where’s David?” Claire asked.

  “He went downstairs about an hour ago,” An
astasia replied, relieved that David had escaped round two of her mother’s inquisition.

  Claire shook her head and clucked with matronly concern. “The poor boy never rests.”

  “When I asked him once what he believes in, he said hard work and baseball. Not dreams. He told me that his dad risked everything for some foolish idea and that the rest of the family had to pay for that.”

  “Oh, my!” Claire put her hand to her mouth, her eyes reflecting her concern. “I had no idea he felt that way. It’s true that my son was a dreamer and he didn’t plan his finances very well, but he had no way of knowing his life and his wife’s would be cut short in a head-on collision. The accident wasn’t his fault.”

  “Does David know that?” Anastasia gently asked.

  “Yes, I’ve told him many times, but he can be stubborn when he gets an idea into his head.”

  “No kidding.” Her voice was rueful. “He told me that there weren’t many arson investigators who were dreamers. I’m thinking that maybe that’s what appealed to him about the job.”

  “You could be right. I keep hoping this leave of absence will be good for him, give him some time off, but he’s not getting much rest when he works all day up here and then goes to the basement.”

  “Doing more repairs?”

  “No, he’s mostly puttering down there.”

  “I’ve never seen him puttering,” Anastasia mused. It sounded as if David had discovered something that had captured his attention. Being the imaginative type herself, she immediately began wondering what it could be. “Let’s go take a look.”

  They found him in a far corner of the basement, rapping his knuckles on the wall and acting most suspiciously. But there was an excitement about him that was unmistakable. This wasn’t a man interested in making repairs, this was a guy with a mission—and missions weren’t all that far from dreams.

  “Is this your version of puttering and, if so, can anyone play?” Anastasia cheerfully inquired.

  8

  DAVID JUMPED a foot before turning to face them.

  “Oh-ho,” Anastasia teased him. “Get a load of that guilty look on his face, Claire. I think we caught him searching for hidden treasure down here.”